theatreSCOTLAND

Redmond–Rutherford

IN real life, Elizabeth I never met Mary Queen of Scots. Neither did the two of them share a confidante in Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. But in the theatre things are different and the great centrepiece of Friedrich Schiller's magisterial drama, Mary Stuart, is a confrontation between the two queens in which French Catholic Mary pleads with English Protestant Elizabeth to lift her death sentence.